Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Cellini's Perseus savagely defies death, time and the domination of magic.

There is a general life cycle common
to organic systems, from bacteria to mammals, up through evolutionary
styles, countries, empires, civilizations, and possibly even the
hypothetical/metaphorical organism Gaia herself. We all know the
stages of the cycle instinctively:

Impregnation: fertilization/initiation
of an unfolding sequence;

Growth: strife/exuberance/expansion to
the available maximum;

Spinning gloriously: successful
consolidation/stabilization;

Senescence: slightly over the hill,
contraction, decay;

Wobbling: a period of increasingly
erratic behaviors;

Failure: catastrophic system breakdown,
dissolution.

"Ciao, nun."

Finally, the detritus left behind
furnishes the elements that will assemble into a new organism, either
fairly similar to its predecessor, or possibly mutated into something
noticeably different, and from that zygote all begins again.

We can observe this pattern in many
forms in the history of human civilizations, but it is perilous to
try to place our own civilization's position in the cycle, because we
are inside it, and can not have the perspective and context that a
millennium or even a century will bring to future observers.
Nevertheless, the knowledge of this cycle is so deeply ingrained in
our individual and collective consciousness, that we make decisions
and experience feelings every day based on our intuitive estimate of
where we are in the cycle right now. And so there is a hypothetical
but fascinating group feeling or opinion that we suppose to be out
there, that we call the Zeitgeist, or the tenor of the times, or some
such phrase. We spend a lot of effort trying to pin down that
feeling, taking polls and watching the mighty opinion stream that we
now have access to, but it is a lot more difficult to really assess
than, say, estimating the flow rate of the Mississippi at any one
time.

"and how miserable life among the abuse of power... cop slave!" Graffito in Florence 2008

And, is this Zeitgeist, if it were in
fact observable, of any actual use? Does it correspond to reality in
assessing where we are in the Cycle? Interesting studies have shown
tantalizing evidence that crowdsourced wisdom, when aggregated in
large blobs and averaged, is sometimes more accurate than expert
analysis. Also, in the case of such informational aggregations,
there can occur a feedback loop in which an opinion gains strength
and through its own existence causes effects that appear to validate
it, making it even stronger, sweeping many human brains before it,
but not necessarily correlating to or much affecting the actual cycle
of the civilization experiencing it. Hence various panics, religious
manias, irrational market swings, exuberant fads, and senseless
violence by the occasional feebleminded individual or cult tend to
reinforce the fear that we are now Wobbling, as the Golden Age phase
has lost much of the high-speed rotation that kept it gloriously
spinning as we danced. But are we in fact Wobbling? I refuse to
assert that we are; but here are some minor examples for your
consideration.

From Reuters, 2/9/2013: Amish Leader
gets 15 years for attacks

“An Ohio Amish sect leader was
sentenced Friday to 15 years in federal prison for his role in
leading hair- and beard-cutting attacks on members of other Amish
communities in 2011.

“Prosecutors had recommended a life
sentence for Samuel Mullet Sr., 67, who was convicted of a hate crime
in September for orchestrating attacks carried out on six Amish men
and two women. Prosecutors said the attacks were motivated by
religious disputes between Mullet and other Amish leaders.

“Fifteen of Mullet's followers in
the breakaway Amish sect, from Bergholz, who were convicted of
multiple counts of conspiracy and kidnapping, received lesser prison
sentences Friday, ranging from one year to seven years.”

Throwaway detail carvings among the mismatched materials on a church wall not far from the Leaning Tower.

A vignette on the human condition writ
small: a dominant male seeks to extend his dominance through
intimidation; his chosen avenue of attack, the sexual vigor of his
rivals as expressed in hair, a very traditional and ancient method.
Samson's strength was sapped, when his woman cut his hair; but his
captors neglected to keep him shorn, and eventually his strength
returned long enough to bring the temple down, the legend goes.
Newly captured slaves and young army recruits are shaved to
subordinate them, to separate them from their original strong
self-image. Most small, insular tribes have rigid rules of
appearance and style, because it is a simple and highly visible means
of demarcation – members can be distinguished from non-members at a
glance – and because it serves as a marker for the effectiveness of
the dominant meme of the group in keeping tight social control. A
cadet at any military academy who fails to shave, who neglects the
current standards of clean and shiny, will soon be cast out, if
punishment fails to bring him to heel. This is all so common that it
might startle us at first that Mullet's offense could merit a life
sentence; but then we see that his actions were deemed to be hate
crimes – far worse than, let us say, the roughhousing of teenage
boys, also seeking to establish dominance, holding one down and
cutting his hair. The identical motive is not nearly so odious when
conflict over religious dogma is absent.

The grand Renaissance fountain in the center of Florence. The frenzies of a golden age, gloriously spinning amid the chaos of the time.

Let us try not to snicker over trivia:
that the man's name is also the name of the least stylish of all hair
styles, and that in the mug shots we see that, to a man, they would
all benefit immensely from the services of a skilled barber, because
their hair and beards are all as ugly as so many mud fences. But I
speak from the arrogant and narrow point of view of the Roman, who
loves a smooth-shaven face and a well-proportioned, elegant haircut
precisely because it marks him at a glance as the infinite superior
of the smelly, hirsute, inarticulate savages living beyond the pale.
In America we mandate not only that all ideologies are to be equally
respected, as long as they do no violence to others, but also that
hatred itself be suppressed entirely, lest we sink back into the
savage mire. But these mandates cannot change our innate drive for
dominance, and their suppression becomes just another weapon to use
upon each other.

Why though is it necessary for tiny
groups to struggle with each other? In the context of a much larger
society that is prosperous and at peace, it is nonsensical. But our
primitive habits of behavior were forged through long millenniums
when peace and prosperity was invariably destroyed, either gradually
or suddenly, and we were forced to struggle by whatever means came to
hand. Instinct will surface even in a Roman, highly educated and
indoctrinated in the idealistic hatred of hatred itself. One trigger
of such instinct might be the deep feeling that there is nowhere to
go, to escape the press of other human individuals and tribes. One
can no longer break away from your stuffy elders and head west.
Instead one must somehow create some space in the midst of the
endless crowd.

Near the Leaning Tower, Romulus and Remus suckle from their wolf mother, absorbing the weird strength that sent that obscure tribe out to dominate all others.

Also in the Post on 2/9/2013: Two more
Marines charged in urination case

“Two more Marines face criminal
charges over a 2011 YouTube video showing members of a scout sniper
platoon urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
The Marine Corps announced charges against Sgt. Robert W. Richards
and Capt. James V. Clement on Friday. Two other marines have already
faced court-martial in the case. Staff Sgt. Edward W. Deptola, who
pleaded guilty in December, was reduced in rank to sergeant and fined
$500.”

Hunting along the crumbling balustrade as weeds grow in the cracks.

Here again, a far more primitive
behavior, with its roots in arboreal primate evolution. Monkeys
throwing shit to discourage enemies could evolve easily into the
human custom of expressing total contempt for enemies by urinating
and defecating on their corpses. This behavior unnerves modern man,
trained to think of his own species as having some irreducible value;
when circumstances become sufficiently competitive, though, we kill
each other, and in order to be able to do that difficult thing, the
individual needs to erect a barrier against any feeling of community
with his enemy, and so the act of contempt, not only in the
physically disgusting aspect but in the disregard of all normal
social barriers, redefines the enemy as being of a different,
non-human species – a process of redefinition pursued routinely by
many other means as well. Of course the enemy becomes, not an
animal, which could be respected in some way, but a sub-human, the
wretched mirror-image of ourselves as degraded savages – an image
that we fear as a part of ourselves, and therefore seek to cast out
onto some other tribe – preferably one whose land and resources we
need. Hence are the Jews called baby eaters, and all the other
million idiotic permutations of hatred bloom in red riot. A small
boy points a finger at another child and says, “Bang.”; he is
reported by school personnel and arrested by police – another
increasingly generic news story, reflecting deep-seated fear of the
violence simmering below.

So the staff sergeant was busted down
to sergeant and fined $500. After all, as war crimes go, this was
pretty small beer. Had he instead cut the beards from the corpses
and hung them from his belt like a Comanche, perhaps he would have
merited a more serious punishment.

"I love you Mom / Burn the prisons"

The other day the Post printed a
generic letter from a self-identified avid birder as a coda to the
recent kerfuffle involving research done on just how many small
animals are killed nationwide by cats, domestic and feral. The
letter writer went further than the usual demand that all domestic
cats never set foot outdoors; he also demanded that all feral cats be
killed. This is a refreshingly honest (though painfully stupid)
manifesto. It perfectly encapsulates the innate attitude of the
world's hyper-dominant predator species. The moment we were able to
utilize our thumbs to good advantage, to use projectile weapons and
clubs, we made it our policy not just to hunt game, but to kill
predators. We quite naturally wanted to maximize our own food supply
and remove ourselves permanently from the list of prey species; hence
we killed all predators but the few that we could suborn for our own
use: the dog, the cat, the falcon, the occasional ferret or mongoose.
After farming was developed we also did our best to discourage
species that 'steal' our grain; cats and small dogs came in handy for
that.

A member of the world's Hyperdominant Predator species, with his feline ally.

This policy of total ownership of nature results in profound
changes, of course, with many unintended consequences. The bird
lover cares little for our immense destruction of natural habitat and
climate, or the chemical problems inherent to the immense machine
culture that tends to all human needs; he just wants his pretty birds
to thrive, and not suffer the 'cruel' death by predator that has
always been the lot of a goodly majority of all the birds that have
ever lived. Birds reproduce very efficiently; all they need is ample
food and suitable habitat, and they will easily stay ahead of the
predations of feral cats, or indeed all cats. Something – either
predators, or pollution, or starvation – must remove a substantial
number of offspring before they reproduce, or the system goes
haywire, with greater cruelty – the blind mechanical boom-and-bust
cycle of unbalanced ecosystems, and indeed, of civilization itself.
This will eventually apply to us as well as to birds and to cats.

Sugar - a small, affectionate female who killed five rats last spring - that we know about. She played with one rat corpse so enthusiastically that it ended up inside the piano. Were we horrified? No. We laugh every time we think of it.

In
theory we, who consider ourselves 'sentient' and allegedly 'sapient',
could deliberately avoid this imbalance; but we just cannot bring
ourselves to do it. With infinitely resourceful rationalization we
try our best to save all those nestlings, and give birth control to
the deer, and to bring all human zygotes to term and a long life no
matter what, and excise hate from the human heart by fiat. We simply
cannot bear to face the truth, and because of that we remain afraid
and savage at heart. I still have not decided whether it is better
this way. A rational and stable society would perhaps be
unrecognizably weird after a few centuries, and perhaps all sense of
an expanding future would disappear; we would no longer dream about
interstellar flight, or faraway worlds.

Gatepost at the Verrazano estate. The foundation stones of the winecellars were laid down roughly a thousand years ago

Nevertheless, this is my manifesto,
however ridiculous: that scientific method should become the official
standard for all knowledge used in public policy. Not superstition,
not faith, not emotional conviction, not anecdotal rhetoric, and not
political ideology. I realize that the logistical problems of my
proposal are formidable and vulnerable to infinite political
distortion; nevertheless, the world has inched, ever so slowly and
painfully, toward this standard for roughly the past 2500 years. I
might take heart in the decomposition by attrition of the Catholic
Church, but offsetting that is the strong religiosity of America, the
nation most dependent on science to maintain itself, and also
offsetting is the decline of rationality in public education, and the
apparent ascendency of ideological bias in education both public and
private. Is anyone measuring these factors? I would assume so,
since we measure just about everything nowadays. But how can we
officially encourage rational thought and establish a hegemony of the
scientific method, without triggering the revolt of the Mullets, and
all those others who cling to their emotional mainstays no matter
what?

The Ponte Vecchio in Florence, also more than a thousand years old, has been rebuilt several times after Arno River flooding; the two central supports may be original. In the center of the span is the bronze bust of Benvenuto Cellini, ready to challenge all who pass by.

As has been amply noted by many
brilliant thinkers, a hegemony of scientific method can just as
easily lead to dystopia as to utopia. Without a clear vision for the
type of life we would like our species to lead on this earth, science
is no better steered than the rudderless ships of religion and
totalitarianism. Such a vision should place paramount value on this
earth itself, and let the yearning and striving for an eternal Heaven
go. What is a good life for a human on this earth, and how
could it be made possible for most of us? And this is a more
difficult question than those that can be answered by science. I'll
save my speculations on that for a later essay. Meanwhile I've got
to pay attention to the amusing gyrations of the Wobbling.

I can't think of any caption for this iron ring. It stands alone.

Disorder in the house The doors
are coming off the hinges The earth will open and swallow up the
real estate

- Zevon/Calderon

The
poor guy in Florida who just got swallowed up by the earth in
his own bedroom – and his
brave, ever-lovin' brother who jumped in after him in a futile rescue
attempt; the fault of our faltering civilization, or just a natural
tragedy like any other? Every death is a sudden swallowing of a
singular, irreplaceable world inside that arching skull. How could
we not be uneasy? The wheels on the bus go round and round; and one
day they start wobbling and falling off. Hang on tight, kids!

Pages

Followers

About Me

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.